CHARLEY BRADY
Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out – nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too.
- BUSTER KEATON
My devotion to Buster Keaton goes back… to the first showings of The General and The Navigator at London’s National Film Theatre. When, by a series of unlikely circumstances, I found myself in Hollywood, in 1964, one of the first people I set out to see was Keaton.
If ever there was an introduction that might have been designed to capture the attention of our very own Adam Scheffler, there you have it.
Seeing that Adam is screening another of his beloved Buster Keaton’s immortal offerings next Saturday (30th March) has me musing that this great silent-era comedian may have had more outings at Silent Cinema Galway than even Chaplin. It also prompts me to share a couple of memories of Buster, memories that have been kept for us due to the efforts of two magnificent silent film historians.
Kevin Brownlow is now 85 years of age and it is no exaggeration to say that without him, silent film scholarship would not even exist in the form that we know it. His accomplishments – be they in his books, his documentaries, or his film restoration – are simply too many to go into here. Mention his name to an old-time aficionado such as myself and what will spring to mind is likely his precious, utterly indispensable 1968 work The Parade’s Gone By…
As you can see from that opening paragraph, Brownlow arrived just in time to record the thoughts and memories of many of the greats of that bygone period so close to our hearts. Because of him, we can ‘hear’ the voices of the giants of that era, who could conceivably have faded into obscurity.
Arriving at Keaton’s bungalow in the San Fernando Valley, Mr. Brownlow was already concocting excuses for what he expected his behaviour to be like, having envisaged a bitter and morose old man, brooding about the people who had wronged him and ruined his career. Instead, he was greeted by his smiling wife Eleanor, and a huge, equally happy St. Bernard.
Buster Keaton emerged from the next room. He was short and stocky, and he looked younger in actuality than the photographs one saw of him – and he laughed. That was the last thing I expected from the comedian.
Indeed, as the interview went on, Keaton’s infectious laughter appeared to have been an unexpected bonus. What I wouldn’t give to have been there!
But I wanted to share this story with you.
In the course of the interview, Mrs. Keaton prompted Buster to tell Mr. Brownlow about the lion during the making of Sherlock Junior. And he proceeded to describe being in the cage out at Universal Studios, large and round and full of tropical foliage.
With a whip and a chair and a gun, the trainer gets two lions in position and I go to mine. My cameraman is outside the cage, shooting through a hole. The trainer says ‘Don’t run, don’t make a fast move and don’t go in a corner’. Well, there is no corner in a round cage!
In order to demonstrate to his guest and interviewer, he pushed the table out of the way:
It was a perfect recreation of the scene in Sherlock Junior with Keaton doing his wonderful walk across the room, whistling nonchalantly. I was so accustomed to seeing him in silent films that I was astonished to hear the whistle.
By now Keaton was helpless with laughter, not what we might expect from him at all. He continued:
I start to walk away from one lion – and lookit, there’s another one, there! I got about this far and I glanced back and both of them were that far behind me, walking with me! And I don’t know these lions personally, see. They’re both strangers to me. Then the cameraman says, ‘We’ve got to do the shot again for the foreign negative’. I said ‘Europe ain’t going to see this scene!’
As Mr. Brownlow was leaving the bungalow, Eleanor called to Buster that he hadn’t fed ‘the girls’.
“Yeah, I did it a minute ago”, he said. “I was about forty-five minutes feeding my chickens out in back”, he explained. “And they were all standing at the gate like this”. And Keaton became a chicken, staring glumly at the sky and tapping his foot with impatience.
Another Memory
Our generation is so used to easy access to the work of most of the greats that it’s easy to forget just how many slipped through the cracks over the years and are today forgotten. The man behind the revival of interest in Buster Keaton was the American Raymond Rohauer (1924 – 1987), a major authority on and collector of silent films. Here’s Mr. Rohauer on the launching of Buster’s return to prominence. The opening night was in Munich in 1962:
I was there, Buster was there with his wife Eleanor and we stood in front of the theatre, and on the marquee was ‘Buster Keaton in Der General’. We could hear the laughter of the people out in the street and Buster said, “What are they laughing at?” I said, “Your picture”. He couldn’t believe it. I said, “Did you ever believe that you would see your name on a marquee as a star again?” ‘“No, he said. “I never thought it would happen.”
And now – thanks to people like Kevin Brownlow, Raymond Rohauer and all of the enthusiasts who have loved the silent film through the years, even when it was considered a pastime fit only for eccentrics – now, we have these memories recorded for posterity.
And we have the work itself preserved forever.
charleybrady@gmail.com